Culture

‘Common’

Common . Nineteenth-century designers saw parks as breathing spaces whose trees would pump oxygen through tenement and mansion alike. Even the vocabulary of green spaces freshens speech—grove and bee, clover and pebble, pine cone and jay.  Seagulls on the common across the street from my family’s house stand as stout…

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Lowell’s Edith Nourse Rogers: “Fight hard, fight fair, and persevere.”

MassMoments reminds us this morning that on this day – September 10, 1960 – U. S. Representative Edith Nourse Rogers died. Mrs. Rogers was the longest serving woman in the U. S. Congress having replaced her late husband John Jacob Rogers upon his death in 1927. The heroine of Veterans and their families…

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Uncle Dave’s Provocative Idea of the Week

He’s back with another brain-stretcher of a mega-concept. David Brooks is writing about a national “gentility shift,” a long-term trend in how Americans are organizing their society, that he suggests may be a root cause of today’s new kind of economic pain. This has to do with younger people mostly—what those with more…

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Robert Frost Fountain

While in Lawrence today for the Bread & Roses Festival, I got my first look at the city’s Robert Frost Fountain, pictured above. This is what is written on the plaque alongside the fountain: Robert Lee Frost, born Mach 26, 1874 was raised here in Lawrence. His first published poem…

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A Modest Proposal: Voluntary Fed Taxes in 2011 to Break the Back of the Great Recession

The following might sound like it came out of the movie “Dave,” in which a presidential look-alike who runs a temp agency (Kevin Kline) winds up being secretly installed as president after the real prez has a stroke. At first manipulated by an evil chief of staff (Frank Langella), “Dave”…

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